Awhile back, I read Liu Cixin’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past series, which won a Hugo Award and was remembered fondly by former president Barack Obama, among others. One recurring theme was the political impossibility of escapism — any time any organization or leader would attempt to save some (but not all) humans, humanity rose up, over and over again, to prevent that from happening, usually dooming everyone in the process. The result, as this lengthy review described it, was a universe in which (for example) the passengers of the Titanic, upon discovering there weren’t enough lifeboats for everyone's survival, would have chosen to let the ship sink, saving no one.

This sounds insane at first blush, but the universe of Remembrance of Earth’s Past is deeply cynical, one in which Hanlon’s Razor (“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”) is inverted. In our own real universe, the Titanic didn’t have enough lifeboats because of a combination of complacency, hubris and human error — and then crashed into an unavoidable iceberg in the dark.

In the even more cynical universe of Remembrance of Earth’s Past, however, the crew intentionally wouldn’t equip the ship with enough lifeboats to begin with — and would then intentionally place the Titanic in harm’s way. In this deeply, deeply cynical universe, the presence of any lifeboat on the Titanic would only mean one thing: Some of the crew was planning to escape (and let others escape) and, unless you were rich enough and powerful enough to pay them off and be part of their survival plan, you were going to drown.

In such a universe, there’s only one thing one could do to change the game: Change the crew’s incentives. The crew can’t profit off of the lifeboats if you destroy all the lifeboats. And if the crew has no chance for escape, they’ll do everything possible to ensure the Titanic’s safe passage. They’ll simply have to — if they themselves want to survive.

With that charming vision of an imagined humanity in mind, let’s talk about public education.

Unsurprisingly, most Nevadans, when given a choice between having access to lifeboats and not having access to lifeboats, prefer to have access to lifeboats. Put less metaphorically, Opportunity Scholarships, Education Savings Accounts, charter schools, and pretty much any other program that gives them options outside of whatever school their children are zoned for, are all wildly popular. Nevada isn’t unique in this regard: less than 30 percent of Washington, D.C.’s students attend the school their neighborhood is zoned for, and, after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans replaced most of its public schools with charter schools.

However, more than a few supporters of the traditional public school system across the country argue that such measures are, to borrow a term from Remembrance of Earth’s Past, escapism. Charter schools were one of the targets of the recent Los Angeles Unified teacher’s strike, and are a major point of contention in Oakland as well. From their perspective, privately provided education is an antidemocratic corporate-sponsored onslaught against teachers unions and our communities. As they see it, the purpose of schooling isn’t to increase test scores, it’s to prepare children to participate in our democracy, and that can only happen via democratically controlled and managed institutions.

Following this line of reasoning, even if a parent might think their child would do better in another school, it doesn’t matter. The parent and their child live in a society, so that parent has an obligation to make their child’s zoned public school better for everyone’s sake. The rich (the argument goes) shouldn’t be permitted to remove their resources from the democratically controlled school district, and the professional middle class also shouldn’t be allowed to remove their skills from the democratically controlled school district, because those resources and skills are precisely what democratically controlled and managed institutions need to succeed and thrive. Otherwise (the argument goes) education will become like the Titanic a few paragraphs back — crews of profit-minded entrepreneurs selling limited access to education (something which everyone should have access to) to rich and middle-class parents while the children of the poor are left to drown.

The existence of lifeboats, then — whether they’re vouchers, Opportunity Scholarships, Educational Savings Accounts, or even publicly funded and publicly monitored charter schools — are proof that our state government seeks to steer public education to disaster. Better to burn the boats so Nevadans focus on bailing out the ship instead of escaping it.

There’s just one problem. Don’t the rich and the middle class get to vote, too? Don’t the parents who don’t just want better schools for their kids, but want to choose better schools for their kids, get a vote, too?

They sure do, as do creationists, anti-vaxxers, and people who think sex education means telling children to close both legs. It shows, too. Democratically-elected control produced school board members that sexually harassed their students, told second-graders “snitches get stitches,” ran afoul of Nevada’s Open Meeting Law, and provided at least half of the material for Orrin Johnson’s columns for The Nevada Independent. The clearly malicious crew of our Titanic-style state education system is… us, or at least the collective product of Nevada’s electoral system, and Nevada’s education system has been a disaster for as long as anyone can remember.

So what do we do? The answer is obvious — abandon the malicious crew.

The only reason you would board a boat with a crew malicious enough to toss lifeboats overboard for profit would be if you were forced to. Under such circumstances, yes, you might destroy the lifeboats so that, at least for the duration of that one journey, the crew might behave themselves. The education of our children, however, takes substantially longer than an early 20th century transatlantic boat ride through a North Atlantic ice field, and the longer we provide power to a clearly malicious crew, the greater the chance they’ll find some way to extract their profits elsewhere — perhaps through district-owned cars for top administrators, for example.

More importantly, though, if we’re really cynical enough to believe that the only way Nevadans will support public schools is if we force them to do so by stripping all other options away, we have to cynically realize that, sooner or later, Nevadans will elect legislators who will allow them to abandon public schools. At some point, if public schools in Nevada want to succeed, they have to do so by getting Nevadans to choose to support them.

David Colborne has been active in the Libertarian Party for two decades. During that time, he has blogged intermittently on his personal blog, as well as the Libertarian Party of Nevada blog, and ran for office twice as a Libertarian candidate. He serves on the Executive Committee for both his state and county Libertarian Party chapters. He is the father of two sons and an IT professional. You can follow him on Twitter @DavidColborne or email him at [email protected].